H2O

In my artwork I seek to engage with embodied and sensory ways of knowing — a sense of belonging to a life amongst lives. It is something we intuitively recognise yet must also actively cultivate, bringing it into awareness through the everyday practices that shape how we move through the world.

​

For me, one of these practices is swimming. I have swum almost daily for much of my life. In the world of water I feel immersed in a vast living system - an encounter with sound, light, movement and breath. Breath becomes the interface between the world inside and outside the body: the subtle rhythm that animates us from birth to death. These photographs capture moments drawn from the depth and rhythm of these experiences.

​

The images were taken in the waters of Gordon’s Bay, where sandstone cliffs meet the ocean on the lands of the Bidjigal and Gadigal peoples in Sydney, Australia. I began swimming there in 1993 while building my earth house, and the practice has continued ever since as a place of somatic return — a space of dissolution, reflection and renewal.

Through this immersed sensibility I became increasingly attentive to the molecular and micro-qualities of the world: textures, tensions and patterns that organise living systems. This attention gave rise to a series of somatic art experiments — photographing coloured oil and water, engraving absorbent papers and tracing the movements of fluids and materials as they resist, disperse and form patterns.

​

These works echo both microscopic and macroscopic worlds — cellular networks, root systems and fluid ecologies — revealing how life continually organises itself through difference and relation. Distributed throughout this body of work, they act like visual traces or sediment: small sites of inquiry where sensation becomes form and the body becomes a method of knowing.